There’s a popular misconception about meditation.
That is that we have to make our minds still, to silence the stream of thoughts that flow through our awareness and have a quiet mind. Otherwise we’re doing it wrong.
I frequently hear this from people who have “tried to meditate,” and given up, discouraged because they can’t quiet the mind. I heard someone say in a recent meditation group, “I can’t stop my thoughts, so I’m not meditating.”
This is simply not the case. It’s impossible for most people to quiet the mind. The mind generates thoughts, in the same way that the heart beats or the lungs breathe. The mind generates thoughts in the same way the the digestive system generates gastric juices so we can digest our food.
Unfortunately this popular misconception fuels a problem that is endemic in the culture - the tendency to be hard on ourselves, the inclination to judge ourselves harshly when we can’t accomplish what we feel we should be able to do.
But meditation is a gentleness practice.
Rather than silence our thoughts, we practice mindfulness meditation to cultivate a different relationship with the noise - a relationship based in gentleness and self-compassion, rather than harsh judgement and the feeling that we’re doing it wrong.
In meditation practice, the doing it is the doing it. And we can step back from the familiar patterns of wondering whether we’re doing it right, or believing that our experience should be somehow different.
We can learn to better accept ourselves, to offer ourselves compassion and grace with whatever conditions arise.
Our thoughts will come and go. There’s nothing we can do about that. But we can learn to view thoughts as a process that the mind goes to, rather than information that we have to respond to.
I like to think of it as like watching a train go by, but I don’t have to get on it:
There goes I’m screwing up again, but I don’t have to go down the road with that. I can sit back in meditation and watch that go by.
I may notice what happens in my body when that thought appears. Maybe me body tenses up a little. But in meditation, I can practice observing that without judgement, and just return to observing my breath, again and again, and again - what one teacher calls “the manual labor of meditation.”
As we learn to observe our thoughts as phenomena, rather than truths, we’ll begin to notice some things:
First, thoughts come and go on their own. We have no control over what thought arises. But we do have some control over what we do when we notice it. We don’t have to go down the rabbit hole with this thought or that one.
We’ll also notice that our thoughts flit from one subject to the next all the time. And as we observe, we’ll see it’s pretty random. One moment I’m having a thought about some music I listened to yesterday, then a thought about a song from 1979, then remembering working in a radio station in the 1970s, and how my neighbor across the street looks like someone I knew at that time and on and on.
It’s not like this train is going somewhere any more than the rain is going somewhere.
As we learn in meditation to see our thoughts as processes, rather than stories, or truths, we can begin to discover a deeper compassion for ourselves.
I’ve been meditating for 30 years. I still wander off in thought and come back several times in a meditation session - sometimes more, sometimes less. It’s different every time. That hasn’t changed.But there are some things that have changed: I’m generally calmer and more centered. I’m more compassionate with myself, and therefore with others. I catch myself more quickly when I’m listening to the thought stream tell me that I’m not okay. I can decide not to go there and turn my mind to something more gentle. I can remind myself as often as I must, which is quite often, that all’s well, I’m doing the best I can, that I’m okay.
The effects of meditation are subtle, but cumulative. Over time you’ll also start to notice that you’re more centered and can more easily go to self compassion and offer yourself the same kindness and grace that you would offer to anyone else.
Don’t worry about doing it right, because you are.